Educational Science

Huge, complete mammoth tusk accidentally discovered by North Dakota coal miners

Coal miners in North Dakota made an astonishing find when they unearthed a partial mammoth skeleton with a complete, 7 foot (2.1 meter) tusk. The miners discovered the well-preserved mammoth tusk while working at the Freedom Mine, near the city of Beulah, over Memorial Day weekend last May. According to...

Woolly mammoths survived on mainland North America until 5,000 years ago, DNA reveals

Woolly mammoths may have survived in North America thousands of years longer than scientists previously thought, vials of Alaskan permafrost reveal. The hairy beasts might have persisted in what is now the Yukon, in Canada, until around 5,000 years ago — 5,000 years longer than experts previously estimated, a new...

Prehistoric Planet sends viewers back in time on a guided tour of the Cretaceous period with Sir David Attenborough, in a documentary series that reimagines familiar dinosaurs such as the mighty Tyrannosaurus rex and introduces lesser-known creatures like the charming owl-like Mononykus. The show portrays the extinct creatures moving and...

Woolly mammoths were seasonal sex fiends just like elephants, study finds

Male woolly mammoths turned into sex fiends when in heat, just like modern elephants do, a new study of ancient hormones preserved in the tusks of the extinct giants has revealed. By charting the annual surges of testosterone in a 33,000-year-old mammoth tusk, researchers have discovered that mammoths underwent musth....

Giant 'dragon of death' with 30-foot wingspan unearthed in Argentina

Researchers in Argentina have unearthed the largest pterosaur species ever found in South America. Dubbed dragon of death by paleontologists, two giant flying reptiles were discovered in the Plottier Formation, an outcrop located in the province of Mendoza. The two specimens' wingspans measured approximately 23 feet (7 meters) wide and...

Triops: Facts about the three-eyed 'dinosaur shrimp'

Triops are a group of freshwater crustaceans commonly called tadpole shrimp or dinosaur shrimp. They look like ancient armored tadpoles, a look they've rocked for hundreds of millions of years. The word Triops means three eyes in Greek, and the group is so named because they have two main compound...

Woolly mammoths weren't always shaggy. Here's when they evolved some of their trademark features.

Woolly mammoths weren't always the shaggy beasts depicted in books and movies. And now, scientists have a better idea of when these behemoths evolved some of their most iconic traits. Researchers from Sweden compared the genomes of 23 Siberian woolly mammoths (Mammuthus primigenius) to the genomes of 28 modern-day Asian...

Woolly mammoth's epic 50,000-mile journey retraced

A mammoth that lived in Alaska about 17,000 years ago traveled so far and wide that, if it had walked in a straight line, it would have gone all the way around the world — nearly twice. Recent analysis of the woolly ice age beast's preserved tusk revealed that in...

30,000 year-old mummified baby mammoth found by Canadian gold miner

A near-perfectly mummified, 30,000 year-old baby woolly mammoth has been unearthed from Canadian permafrost by a miner in the Klondike region's gold fields. The stunningly preserved baby, which measured just 4.5 feet (1.4 meters) long and has much of its hair and skin intact, was described by officials as the...

The CIA wants to bring woolly mammoths back from extinction

The CIA is funding research into resurrecting extinct animals — including the woolly mammoth and tiger-like thylacine — according to news reports. Via a venture capital investment firm called In-Q-Tel, which the CIA funds, the American intelligence agency has pledged money to the Texas-based tech company Colossal Biosciences. According to...